


The Deep Places

by evilgiraff



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-25
Updated: 2013-09-25
Packaged: 2017-12-27 14:39:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/980087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilgiraff/pseuds/evilgiraff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who's afraid of the dark?</p>
<p>Written for the prompt: "It is dark, so dark so dark he cannot see his hands. It is quiet, he cannot even hear his own breathing. There is nothing, only him and the void."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Deep Places

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for [HP-Silencio](http://hp-silencio.livejournal.com/), which is a dialogue-free challenge fest. Sadly, it has been dropped from the fest because the mods feel it doesn't comply with the rules, and I have no time (or inclination) to make edits. However, I still like it, so here it is.
> 
> I hope [0idontknow0](http://0idontknow0.livejournal.com/) likes this! It's a fabulous prompt, which could have gone in a hundred different ways. Many thanks to the Royal Forest of Dean Caving Club, for having such a superb online gallery of underground photographs to remind me what caves are like. As ever, thank you to the always-wonderful [omi-ohmy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Omi_Ohmy/pseuds/Omi_Ohmy) for support and beta skills.

Harry's flat is nothing special. It's at the end of a row of not-quite-attractive town houses that have been converted into flats by penny-pinching landlords. The living room carpet sags into damaged floorboards, and the kitchen sink is stained by a tap that just won't stop dripping. The lady who lives in the flat below bangs on her ceiling if Harry wanders around wearing shoes for more than two minutes, and he suspects the friendly couple across the road have a thriving sideline selling marijuana. It's not the sort of place anyone dreams of living in, just a stop-gap on the way to bigger and better things. Despite this, Harry likes it. An accident of planning and geography has left his house with a large garden containing an ancient horse chestnut tree that supports a ramshackle treehouse. His kitchen is small but perfectly formed, and the living room came furnished with an enormous orange leather sofa that is as comfortable as it is ugly. He goes to work every day, pays his rent from his own meagre savings rather than from the vast wealth in his parents' vault. He feels like he's worth something, something solid, something measurable, when the Voldemort years seem so insubstantial and his own contribution even more precarious.

He walks to work most days, unless the weather is particularly unpleasant. It's the calm before the storm, a peaceful and gentle start to what often turns into a frantic day. The entrance to St Mungo's is as busy as ever, but his colleagues in the paramedics' station are relaxed, greeting him cheerfully when he arrives. Harry bustles around the break room, stashing his lunch in the overcrowded fridge and listening to Keith's outrageous tales from his holiday in Ibiza. As ever, Draco challenges every anecdote with a raised eyebrow and a disparaging comment, which only seems to encourage Keith's storytelling. When Courtney walks in from the control room, she swats both Draco and Keith round the head with a copy of the _Gardeners' World_ magazine, which naturally sends both men into melodramatic protestations of abuse.

It's no longer strange, working with Draco Malfoy. To begin with it was awkward, both of them stammering apologies and too conscious of the other, but with time it settled first into a solid working relationship and then the gentle bantering of almost-friends. And then the whole team had been called in to a house fire in Yorkshire. Each of them had seen horrific injuries, white-knuckled neighbours, sobbing relatives. They had worked with each other like a well-oiled machine, any last vestige of roughness coming into a smooth alignment and bone-deep acknowledgement of the varying skills amongst the team. Harry likes working with them, likes the confidence that comes with expertise and experience. Nisha is the head of the team, directing each of them, liaising with the other emergency departments, and bringing in cake every now and again just because she can. Despite his flair for exaggeration, Keith is the anchor, the lodestone, the heart. Courtney is their engineer, the one who is best at pinpointing the root cause of a problem. Draco is the voice. He is the one who patients respond to best, the one who inspires trust, whether their patient is a toddler with a broken arm or a pensioner with heart problems.

It's no longer strange, but it is, perhaps, moving back into awkward. Seeing Draco every day, laughing with him in breaks, watching his grim acceptance as they deliver patients into the hands of waiting doctors, handing him cups of tea at the end of a long day, it's all grist to Harry's Malfoy-centric mill. He feels sometimes like he hasn't moved on since sixth year, and although the suspicion is gone, sometimes the focus and the intensity of his own fascination are so acute they make him catch his breath in surprise. He shakes his head, rolling his eyes at himself, and makes a round of teas. He tries not to notice how his heart rate spikes when Draco smiles his gratitude.

The tea is still warm when the first siren of his shift sounds, and it spills over Harry's hand as he jumps to his feet and hurries off to the Apparition point, grabbing the co-ordinates of the emergency from Nisha as he goes. His wet thumb smudges the ink, but it's still reasonably legible. Harry squints at the numbers, flicks his wand, and the bustling room disappears in a blur of colours and good-natured grumbling.

Even after years of practice, he's still not perfected the art of a smooth Apparition. When he lands at the emergency site, it's dark and the ground under his feet is uneven. He staggers forward, his right foot sliding away until he falls full-length, his knees jarring at the impact. The gentle skittering of his wand bouncing, then rolling away from him is a light-hearted sort of sound; almost gleefully flippant. Harry groans, swears under his breath, turns over, and looks around – or at least, he tries to. It's dark, such a complete darkness that he can't tell the difference between having his eyes open or closed. He waves a hand in front of his face, but to no avail.

He cautiously slides one hand along the floor, trying to get an idea of his surroundings and also hoping to come across his wand. The ground is chilly and slightly damp, uneven stone in all directions. It's roughly level where he's sitting, but the cold rock is almost featureless. There are a couple of slick and slimy patches, from which he recoils when his questing fingers encounter them. His wand is nowhere to be found, and without it he cannot Apparate away. In turning himself around and investigating his surroundings, he's no longer certain which direction it rolled in, in any case. He shouldn't move, he knows – he's clearly mis-read the Apparition co-ordinates, and someone will notice soon enough, and come looking for him. He hopes.

Without a goal to focus on, Harry tucks his knees up against his chest in a vain attempt to calm the hammering of his heart. Being alone in the dark is sickeningly familiar, and the reactions to it come as easily as if he'd never left his cupboard at all. The darkness is an invisibility cloak for itself, hiding everything from him, and Harry curls up tightly, trying to be small, to be insignificant, to be utterly unworthy of notice even as the darkness exposes him to anything that might be looking. The quiet is absolute. Even when he holds his breath and listens as hard as he can, Harry can't hear anything. When he gives in and takes a breath, the rush of air through his nostrils is so loud it's almost obscene. He buries his face in his knees, breathing into the rough fabric of his uniform trousers to muffle the cacophony. His joints creak every time he makes even the slightest of movements; an echo of years gone by, of footsteps on the stairs. Long moments pass.

Harry jerks upright with a gasp. His breathing is quick and shallow and he looks around wildly, his eyes widening in a futile attempt to see. Darkness, unpredictable and mercurial, has been kind as well as cruel to him in the past, but here, now, alone, it's anything but benign. The dark is no longer the friendly disguise, the comrade that would conceal him from all ill-doers, though it could not always shield him from their malice. This darkness is greedy and invasive, and it wants more than to cloak him, more than to caress him. It wants the very space that he occupies, and it wraps around him on all sides, crushing his hips and his shoulders, bowing his back under its weight. He lashes out, fingers splayed as if he could push it away, but it sneaks around his invisible hands and creeps into his ears and his nostrils, the cold taste of it thick on his tongue as it slides past his teeth. There's a ringing in his ears, a high-pitched keening that echoes off the bare rocks and bounces all around him. It takes several minutes for Harry to realise that he is the origin, and when he does he clamps his mouth closed so tightly he can hear his teeth grinding and his jaw muscles groaning.

There's no reliable way of measuring time here, with no clock, no sun, no shadows. Instead, Harry counts. Not out loud, but in his head. He counts steadily to sixty, and then folds down one finger. Every time he folds down all his fingers – and thumbs – he feels around until he finds a small stone, and puts it in his pocket. The weight of the first stone against his thigh is comforting, a reminder of his first year at Hogwarts, of Dumbledore's approval and his parents' faces. When he has two stones, a small smile steals across his face as he thinks of his two best friends. The third stone conjures up more uncomfortable feelings – the Deathly Hallows are pushed aside, replaced with a mental image of a young Draco Malfoy, flanked as ever by Crabbe and Goyle but with a cheerful expression far more reminiscent of the man than the boy. At the seventh stone, Harry determinedly thinks of each Weasley in turn, filling his mind with family dinners and knitted jumpers instead of serpents, cups and lockets. He has been counting for sixteen stones – getting on for three hours, give or take – when something changes. There's a distant noise, like a muffled thunderclap distorted by echo. Two stones later, he can hear the faintest of footsteps, slowly growing louder and occasionally punctuated by the scraping sound of boots slipping on loose stones and the rattling of small rockfall.

When Harry has collected twenty-two stones, he stops counting, because there's a light in the darkness. He stares at it, blinks with one eye at a time, in case it disappears when he's not looking. It flickers once, and a silhouette of a man clambering over a rock is briefly outlined against the dark. After a while, the light multiplies into several points, grows strong enough that the surrounding area is illuminated, and Harry dares to look around, though bright spots dance in front of him. He's on the floor of a large cave, populated by several large stalagmites and stalactites. A few of them have joined together in strangely beautiful formations, jagged teeth hanging from the ceiling and thick, probing fingers stretching up towards them. Spindly columns cast long shadows that paint the cave in stripes of light and dark, and this reminder of Harry's cupboard brings both remembered panic and the relief born of familiarity.

The owners of the footsteps grow steadily closer, human outlines resolving and sharpening into the figures of two men – one looking calm, moving over the uneven rocks with a practised ease. The other is obviously both uncomfortable and worried, his eyes flickering around and his shoulders tight. As soon as he sees Harry, though, he stills, the tension draining from his posture. Dressed in overalls and head torch, and carrying a large hurricane lamp, Draco Malfoy is a far cry from his usual simple stylishness. He stoops several feet from Harry, picks up Harry's wand, then sets the lamp beside a short, squat stalagmite and sits down, handing over the wand as he does so, smiling gently. Harry shuffles sideways, scattering numberless stones, until he's next to Draco. It seems the most natural thing in the world to reach across Draco's lap, grab his hand and hold on to it, warm and dry as it is.

When Harry clings even tighter, curling up over his knees and bringing both his own hands and Draco's to his chest, Draco reaches out and wraps an arm around Harry's shoulders, letting Harry rock gently without saying a word. As Harry starts to shake, though, Draco tugs his hand away, turns sideways and pulls Harry into his arms. They sit together for a long time, as the cave fills with quiet echoes of muffled sobs and murmured reassurances. Eventually, Harry quietens, and the two of them get to their feet, taking one last look at the cave as Draco's guide – Andy, apparently – reaches out to pull them into a Side-Along Apparition. The cave disappears with a swiftness that turns Harry's stomach, the darkness reaching for him even as he makes his escape.

The hospital is so well-lit, Harry cries out in shock. Colours seem too rich, every sound too loud, and the air stiflingly warm. He breathes it in greedily, filling his lungs with sunlight and safety. Andy takes Draco's lamps, waves away all expressions of gratitude, and Disapparates with a sharp crack that rings in Harry's ears for long seconds. Draco leads Harry into the break room, sits him down, and pours him a cup of lukewarm coffee from the jug in the corner. In this bright and sterile atmosphere, Draco looks utterly bizarre, still wearing the filthy overalls and with a mucky streak across his forehead. He peels the overalls off, washes his face in the sink, and sticks up two fingers without looking around when Keith's wolf whistle pierces the air. Harry's heart rate steadies into a normal rhythm as he watches the reassuringly mundane and familiar movements, and listens to Courtney's gossiping from next door. He feels almost normal by the time he has to recount the incident to Nisha, who berates him for getting the co-ordinates wrong in the first place, then hugs him with a relieved look on her face. Filling out the incident form in the break room, surrounded by noise, bright lights, and other people, it all seems like a bad dream.

Draco escorts him home that night, sleeps on Harry's sofa with all the lights on, and makes breakfast in the morning. It's unexpected, that Draco is such a comforting presence – and so willing to be one, but Harry is not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. A week or so later, Draco is no longer sleeping on Harry's sofa, but he hasn't returned to his own home for more than a quick grab for clean clothes either. Six months later, Draco hands his notice in to his landlord. The morning sunlight still weaves through the branches of the horse chestnut tree outside Harry's flat, skates over a few abandoned magazines, and comes to rest on a heap of twenty-two small stones on his bedside table.


End file.
